B2B Audience Targeting: How Primer is Solving the Unique Marketing Discovery Problem
B2B marketing has long operated with a significant disadvantage compared to its B2C counterparts. While consumer brands enjoy robust targeting capabilities across major ad platforms like Facebook and Google, B2B marketers have largely been confined to LinkedIn, search, and outbound email — channels that quickly become saturated and expensive.
Enter Primer, a company disrupting the B2B marketing landscape by solving one of its most persistent challenges: connecting work identities to personal ones to enable powerful cross-channel targeting.
In a recent episode of the Click & Mortar podcast, hosts Mike Patterson and Dustin Trout sat down with Keith Delaney, CEO and co-founder of Primer, to discuss how his company is revolutionizing audience targeting for B2B marketers.
The Journey from Teacher to Tech Founder
Keith’s path to founding Primer wasn’t a straight line. “It’s been a circuitous journey, as many careers are,” he explained. Starting as a high school history teacher after college, Keith eventually found his way into marketing and landed at Dropbox during its explosive growth phase.
After cutting his teeth in Silicon Valley and working at another Y Combinator startup, Keith realized he didn’t really like having a boss and began exploring entrepreneurial options. While working as a consultant, he noticed he was setting up the same systems over and over again for clients — many involving data engineering and audience creation.
“What if we could take this list of work emails and convert it into an audience on Facebook that would work?” Keith recalled thinking. “I was like, ‘God, somebody’s got to turn this into a business.’”
Despite initial hesitation about entering the crowded MarTech space, Keith and his co-founder built a minimum viable product that reached approximately $1 million in revenue within just nine months.
The B2B Marketing Discovery Problem
The core challenge Primer addresses is fundamental to B2B marketing:
Most digital advertising platforms are built for consumer targeting.
“B2B kind of gets the short end of the stick when it comes to marketing,” Keith explained. “Most of the distribution channels that exist for getting discovered as a product are built for consumer companies.”
While LinkedIn, search, and outbound email are the traditional B2B channels, they quickly become saturated. The problem lies in connecting professional identities to the personal ones that ad platforms actually use for targeting.
“Everybody has a work email that’s not hard to find, but that’s not the data that Google uses,” Keith noted. “You need that Gmail if you’re going to feed it to Google in order to target me as a CEO, not just as a guy who likes to buy Nikes.”
The Primer Solution: Impressive Match Rates
What makes Primer stand out is its ability to dramatically increase match rates between work identities and personal ones that advertising platforms recognize. According to Keith, “If you just were to upload a list of work emails to Facebook, you get a 10% match rate. With Primer, you can get in the neighborhood of 40 to 60%.”
Dustin Trout, one of the partners here at EIC, reported even better results: “I haven’t seen less than about an 85% match rate with a couple clients and lots of audiences.”
This capability allows B2B companies to break free from the LinkedIn-only approach (where “CPMs are through the roof”) and target their audiences across multiple platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Google, Reddit, and others.
Ethical Data Sourcing
A natural question arises: How does Primer get this data, and is it legal?
Keith addressed this head-on: “There’s a dark underbelly of third-party data and there always has been, but there also are a lot of companies that are very above board.”
He explained that all the data Primer uses comes from opted-in sources — places where people have given permission for their information to be used. Often, this happens through free products and mobile apps where users agree to terms of service that allow for data sharing.
“If you do accept it, you’re kind of opening yourself up to companies like Primer being able to help really cool B2B companies actually get discovered,” Keith said. “I like a highly personalized, well-targeted ad. I like finding things that are kind of cool and relevant to me.”
Who Benefits Most from Primer?
Primer serves mid-market companies — specifically those with between 100 and 10,000 employees. According to Keith, this sweet spot exists because:
Very large companies often have complex procurement processes that make them difficult to sell to.
Very small companies typically lack the marketing sophistication and budget to fully utilize the platform.
“Most super early-stage companies aren’t going to spend $20,000 a month on ads,” Keith noted. “So why would they lean into Primer in its current state?”
However, he sees potential to develop offerings that would help smaller companies “who are just dipping their toes into advertising” with benchmarks and guidance derived from aggregated customer data.
Advanced Targeting Strategies
During our conversation, Keith shared several sophisticated targeting approaches that Primer enables:
Instagram for B2B Awareness
Despite not being traditionally considered a B2B platform, Keith reported strong engagement on Instagram for awareness campaigns. The challenge is that “you don’t get a ton of last-click converts” because people typically don’t sign up for B2B products from their phones.
To address this measurement gap, Primer builds holdout groups into audiences — essentially creating control groups that don’t see the ads. This allows companies to measure the true lift in conversion rates across devices.
Strategic Google Audience Usage
Keith highlighted two powerful strategies for using Primer audiences in Google campaigns:
Exclusion targeting: “I never want to serve a search ad to my existing users, especially a branded search ad… [or] to anybody outside of my ICP.”
Inclusion targeting: “We’ve got these keywords that are super expensive to bid on. Why don’t we only run them towards folks that we know are qualified through the Primer audience?”
He also mentioned impressive results using Primer audiences as signal in Performance Max campaigns on Google and demand-driven campaigns.
The Future of Primer
Looking ahead, Keith outlined several directions for Primer’s growth:
Expanding channel coverage: Adding more platforms where Primer audiences can be effectively deployed.
Increasing data sources: Beyond Salesforce, HubSpot, and CSV imports, adding connections to workplace tools.
Improving measurement: Developing better ways to assess audience impact and conversion lift.
Mining for insights: Analyzing the performance data across customers to surface actionable recommendations.
Advice for B2B Marketers
Keith closed the conversation with some valuable perspective for all B2B marketers:
“It’s a challenging time for marketers in general, particularly in B2B. It’s this feeling that there’s limited channels,” he noted. “It’s funny how channels kind of act cyclically… everybody’s sort of saying, ‘I feel like right now I hear a lot about events.’ And I’m like, ‘Cool, that’s great.’ And that will be great until everybody starts getting invited to too many events, and then they start saying no to them.”
His recommendation: “That’s the beauty and the challenge of being a marketer — you have to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s changing and evolving and look for the opportunities where other people aren’t paying attention… It’s just that first principles thinking that I think more B2B marketers need to embrace as opposed to a little bit of the herd mentality.”
Want to hear more insights from Keith Delaney and learn how Primer is transforming B2B audience targeting? Check out the full episode of the Click & Mortar podcast here or visit our blog at blog.example.com for more marketing insights and strategies.
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
Listen to the Full Episode on Spotify
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